Examples from Real Life

 

Data mining methods are applied to more and more different areas. According to Piatetsky-Shapiro [PS94], the most prominent ones are astronomy, supermarket sales analysis, health care, stock market, direct marketing, insurance fraud detection, manufacturing and software analysis.

We choose to give some specific examples:

Chemistry

Automatically extracting information about chemical reactions from journal texts[APBL91].

Sky survey

A system called SKICAT uses a number of machine learning methods to recognize objects in images and analyzes sky surveys faster and more accurately than any expert. The results are much used by scientists[FWD93].

Supermarket sales

Several commercial applications exist which identify and report trends and exceptional events. One such system is called SPOTLIGHT [AK92].

Monitoring trading activities

Inspector is the name of a system which creates daily and weekly reports informing foreign exchange managers about important activities and risks[BCHW91].